Page 20 of A Witchy Spell Ride (31 Days of Trick or Treat, Bikers and Mobsters #15)

Chapter Fifteen

Ghost

I got her out in under twelve minutes.

No arguments. No delays.

Selene packed a bag in silence, just essentials and handed me the charm Briar had given her like it was something sacred.

We didn’t speak much; I didn't need to. Everything had already been said. Someone had been in her apartment. Watching us. Documenting us. Not just her, but me, too. As if I’d stolen something he thought was his.

He hadn’t left fingerprints.

But he’d left intent.

And that was worse.

On the stairs I walked ahead of her, not because I didn’t trust her footing, but because I trusted my back less. I took the corners wide. Listened for the wrong kind of quiet, the vacuum-suck silence a man makes when he holds breath to be smaller than the walls.

Outside, Reaper was waiting at the gate.

He didn’t yell. Didn’t growl. Just looked at Selene like he could see every crack in her armor. He didn’t say I told you so. He put his hand on her shoulder and tipped his head toward the clubhouse like church. She went in without breaking.

Cross met us by the stairs, phone in hand, already coordinating with Thorne to upgrade the compound’s outer perimeter and run every plate within three blocks of Selene’s shop over the past month.

Ghosts don’t hide from men like Cross.

They get dragged into the light.

Bones pulled up a chair near the entrance, setting up his own kind of welcome mat — a crowbar, two throwing knives, and a fuck-off stare that could break ribs. Vex was behind the bar with a glass he wasn’t drinking, eyes cutting to the door every time it breathed.

Selene didn’t ask questions. Just moved through the clubhouse like someone being carried by instinct. She paused in front of her old room, the one with the scratched-up door and the blackout curtains that once kept hangovers safe and secrets safer.

“I’m not a prisoner,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

“No,” I said. “You’re the queen in a house full of killers.”

She looked at me. And for the first time, I saw fear shift into something else. Power. Fire banked low.

She nodded once and stepped inside. Briar followed close behind, already declaring she’d redecorate in skulls and glitter if Selene let her. Selene rolled her eyes, and the room exhaled for the first time.

I gave them space. Then I turned around and went back to the one place I didn’t want her anymore. Her apartment. The building was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that screamed come closer. I didn’t.

I moved slow. Gloves on. Weapon holstered. Every step deliberate like I was walking a pressure plate field again. The corridor smelled like last night’s gumbo and old bleach and something new underneath, faint as a secret.

I swept the apartment inch by inch, bottom up.

Cleared the kitchen first, cabinets, fridge top, under the sink.

Then the living room, behind the couch, under cushions, beneath the rug where people who watch too much TV hide their sins.

I checked the smoke alarm, the vent, the lamp shades, the corners where a camera could sit and pretend to be a screw.

Nothing. No signs of forced entry. No new notes. No leftover objects.

But something felt wrong.

There’s a weight a room takes when it’s been looked at in the wrong way.

Not touched. Studied. The hairs on my arm lifted like radar.

I stood in the hallway and listened, not for sound, but for the gap where sound should be and wasn’t.

A drip that should’ve been a drip. The hum of a cheap camera that should’ve whined when light hit plastic.

I opened the hall closet last. The one near the bathroom. And there it was. A single red string. Nailed into the inside of the door. Not tied, Not hung, Nailed.

Deliberate. Violent. A statement.

I didn’t touch it. Didn’t need to. The message was clear. He knew. He knew I’d come back here. Knew I’d check. I knew I’d find it. This wasn’t just about Selene anymore. This was about me. The intruder wasn’t just watching her. He was watching us.

And this?

This was a challenge. A sick, silent dare.

Step closer. Try and take her. See what happens.

I closed the closet door gently. Then I stepped back. And smiled.

Because the bastard just made the biggest mistake of his life.

He made it personal.

I set the room the way men do when they intend to come back.

Hair across the latch. Chalk tick marks on hinges and window frames so light you’d call them dust. A sliver of mirror tucked under the eave to catch a reflection of a face that leaned too close.

I slid a thin slice of aluminum foil behind the deadbolt strike if the bolt slid even a whisper while I was gone, I’d know.

I left one whisper of aftershave on the bathroom counter that wasn’t mine, a decoy scent in case he was that kind of animal.

On my way out, I took a photo of the nail head and the red string. Sent it to Cross with one line:

Nailed thread. Closet. He knows my cadence.

Cross replied with a dot and then a second later with:

On my way w/ kit. Don’t breathe on it.

I didn’t. I shut the door. Set another hair on the latch. Walked away like I was leaving something I wasn’t done with because I wasn’t.

Back at the clubhouse, Reaper met me in the hall outside Selene’s room. He had that look like he’d swallowed glass and smiled anyway.

“Well?” he asked.

“Clean,” I said. “Which is the problem.”

Briar leaned out of the doorway, glitter on her cheek like war paint. “Define clean.”

“Nothing you can take to a lab and make a man out of. Closet door had a red thread nailed inside. That’s not for Selene.”

Reaper’s eyes went colder. “It’s for you.”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” he said, and there was nothing good in it. “Because now I don’t have to pretend this is only her problem.”

“We weren’t pretending,” I said. “We were prioritizing.”

He grunted. “Cross?”

“On his way to the scene with a kit.”

“And you?”

“Here,” I said. “Until dusk.”

He nodded. Deal made without the weight of words.

Inside the room, Selene sat on the edge of the bed with a towel around her shoulders while Briar hacked at her hair with a pair of shears like a surgeon who’d run out of time but not nerve.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Change the silhouette, confuse the pattern,” Briar said. “Also, she’ll look hot.”

Selene’s mouth tugged at the corner. “She needed to feel useful.”

“Useful is a decoy walk,” Reaper said from behind me.

Briar pointed with the scissors. “That too.”

Selene’s eyes found mine in the mirror across from the bed. She held my gaze while hair fell like black ribbon onto the floor. She looked like a woman molting. Like a blade getting honed.

“Anything at the apartment?” she asked without looking away.

“Just a message. For me.”

“I figured.”

“You figured right.”

Her mouth made that small, private almost-smile I’d pretended not to memorize.

I left before I did something I wouldn’t regret until later.

Cross arrived with a rolling case that said do not ask questions in twelve languages. He and I went back to the apartment without Reaper because Reaper wanted to tear the building apart with his hands and we needed it intact enough to read.

Cross put on a pair of booties like a fashion choice and knelt in front of the closet. “Photograph. Bag air. Lift prints no one left. Swab for DNA no one’s dumb enough to drip.” He talked to himself as much as me.

“You think he wore gloves?” I asked, even though we both knew the answer.

“I think he reads crime blogs,” Cross said. “And I think he’s sloppy in ways that aren’t about touch. That’s where we get him.”

“Like what.”

He pointed at the nail. “This is a choice. He could’ve taped the thread. He could’ve tied it. Nailing is ritual. He wanted permanence. He wanted to make a mark he thinks I won’t see under paint.”

“You will,” I said.

“I will,” he echoed, smug and mild. He took the nail out with tweezers, placed it in a vial like a relic.

“Galvanized. Cheap. Hardware store on Dauphine sells these. So do six others. But if I get a metal trace that looks like their bin and not the competitor’s, I can ask better questions with money. ”

He swabbed the thread for skin cells, pocket lint, stray oils. “You can tell a lot about a man by what his pocket leaves on cotton.”

“We already know enough,” I said.

“That he’s obsessed?”

“That he thinks obsession is love,” I said. “And that he thinks men like me are a disease he can cure with a hammer.”

Cross looked up at me. “You sound calm.”

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

“Calm and cold are cousins.”

“Which one are you?”

“Yes.”

He grinned despite himself. “Reaper says you only do jokes when you’re about to do something terrible.”

“He’s not wrong.”

We packed the kit. Cross left a tiny motion sensor no bigger than a thumbnail in the closet door seam, something he “didn’t do anymore.

” I ignored it. We both did. He scraped a smear of dust from the top of the door frame into a tube, because yes, people clean, but people clean differently; maybe the difference would tell us a story about a man too orderly for his lies.

On the way back to the clubhouse we didn’t talk about Selene. We talked about routes and angles and the stain on Cross’s tie that looked like coffee but probably was someone else’s bourbon. We passed the praline guy; he gave me a free piece because I looked like I needed sugar or mercy.

At the gate, Banks was there.

He was sweeping like sweeping was an art form and he was failing at it. He glanced at the truck and then away so fast he might as well have held up a sign that said I am avoiding guilt. I got out slow.

“Prospect,” I said.

“Ghost,” he said, and went for casual, missed, landed on sweaty.

“You been here all morning?”

“Yeah.”

“You go by the shop?”

“No.” Too quick. He licked his lips. “I mean, I walked past on my way back from.”